4chan creator looks to move creativity beyond the rageface with new iPad app

DrawQuest: you're creative enough, and good enough.

App Details

Plaform: iPadPrice: FreeLink:App store4chan creator Chris Poole (alias moot) launched a free app Friday called DrawQuest, which provides users with drawing prompts and encourages them to use their imagination to fill in the missing parts of a drawing. The app strives to encourage creativity and find a middle ground between the open-endedness and competition extremes that seem to split current app offerings down the middle.

Poole, who followed 4chan with the image-sharing service Canvas, stated that he noticed most adults don’t consider themselves creative. He said that many struggle with the “blank paper problem”—when presented with a sheet of paper and asked to make something, they freeze. But for people who do identify as creative, that quality “has a lot less to do with natural ability versus the ability to self-start,” Poole said.

Enlarge/ The home screen of DrawQuest, where users can access old quests.

When users sign up for the app, they are presented each day with a “daily quest,” or simple sketch (an outline of a superhero, a stick figure standing on a shore) and a question to help them fill the drawing in. A color wheel and a few different line-drawing tools are provided in the app, and users can post their drawing to a feed, as well as follow friends to view and like their drawings. The app is done up in such a nonthreatening design that it seems a bit childlike, but Poole states he hopes to "appeal to the child in every adult... being like play was important to us."

Unlike DrawSomething, DrawQuest doesn’t structure art up into a competition; unlike apps like Paper, the user isn’t simply handed art tools and then cut loose. Poole’s other project, Canvas, also attempts to encourage creativity by allowing users to “remix” the drawings of others and share them, but since it’s on the Web it generally requires tools that most users don’t have (a tablet and pen) or hampers them with the mouse and keyboard, as opposed to the iPad’s touch interface. The app is also a step up from cut-and-paste art that the Internet can be so fond of, such as rage faces.

Poole states the he thinks of DrawQuest like “a Mr. Potato Head,” a tool to foster creativity. “Very few people make music on a daily basis, but a lot of people could benefit from making music,” Poole said. “We want there to be happy accidents, for people to be happy they’re even doing it.”

30 Reader Comments

I still find it slightly unbelievable that his real name is Chris Poole. I assumed he was taking the piss with, "CP" for literally years.

Good to see Moot fighting for the creation of more original content online. He's the man behind a large percentage of the fuel for sites like Reddit, and even news and tech sites like ARS - I hope he finds the success (read: money) that 4chan should have, but never quite managed to generate.

I feel a little cheated after reading the whole thing, thinking it sounded quite cool, then clicking the link and finding out it's exclusively for the iPad. There really is very little indication of that in the article (in my mind, the word "app" does not imply exclusively Apple, let alone exclusively iPad. A solitary mention of it's touch interface at the very end doesn't either). Is there anything similar for other platforms?

It's actually a great idea creatively. Sometimes spending time working on someone else's concept for 20 minutes can snap you out of your own focused funk. It's solving problem you didn't even ponder as a problem before. And because it is so open ended you really have a decent opportunity to flex the mental muscle a bit. I am recommending this to a few artistic kids I know as we'll, having a focal point like this helps get them practicing again and again.

It does need some more brush types, but the color selection is reasonable enough. Would also like a zoom, an adjustable eraser size, and a mask function. Maybe if this does well enough.

Yes, it would be nice to get an Android or Win version out, but its not essential at launch. But allowing the community to get even bigger is going to be a need that has to be addressed at some point so I'd be shocked if it doesn't come.

It's actually a great idea creatively. Sometimes spending time working on someone else's concept for 20 minutes can snap you out of your own focused funk. It's solving problem you didn't even ponder as a problem before. And because it is so open ended you really have a decent opportunity to flex the mental muscle a bit. I am recommending this to a few artistic kids I know as we'll, having a focal point like this helps get them practicing again and again.

It does need some more brush types, but the color selection is reasonable enough. Would also like a zoom, an adjustable eraser size, and a mask function. Maybe if this does well enough.

Yes, it would be nice to get an Android or Win version out, but its not essential at launch. But allowing the community to get even bigger is going to be a need that has to be addressed at some point so I'd be shocked if it doesn't come.

Hope so. My wife and toddler love drawing together on her Yoga. She was really excited about this until she saw it was iPad only.

I did submit a long list of suggestions through the site, and he did write back that most of them are on the to-do list. I'm (completely) guessing they will get some more features locked down, then port, rather than trying to keep both versions in feature parity until the feature list settles down a bit.